I Feel Duped

I’ve been married almost 5 months and I feel like I was completed tricked into marrying someone completely different than who I proposed to and fell in love with. Prior to our marriage, we never fought. My wife was loving, caring, unselfish. We were a team. Since we’ve been married, she’s done a complete 180 and has admitted that she purposely changed. Her reasoning is that she moved in with me in a completely new city without knowing anybody so anytime she had an issue prior to marriage, she claims she bit her tongue so not to cause any problems. Now that she has established roots and friends and career here, she says she can now be herself. Unfortunately, she has become unbelievably selfish and unempathetic since we’ve been married and we are no longer a team. This has led to constant arguments and irrational, impulsive and aggressive behavior from my wife in the past 5 months. We’ve gone to counseling a few times but she decided she didn’t want to go anymore because she said she felt worse after going. I disagreed with her but she gets very defensive when you try to convince her to do something she doesn’t want to do. What scares me is that she’s turning into her mother, which she swore she wouldn’t do when we were engaged. Her mother is bipolar, on medication and emotionally unstable. Her parents’ relationship consists of her mother having one of her fits and her father taking it and doing and saying nothing. Obviously this was a concern prior to marriage, but I was assured that she was nothing like her mother and didn’t want to be anything like her mother, yet she admitted in one of our counseling sessions post marriage that she’s more like her mother than she thought and it scares the hell out of me.

She has said repeatedly that she doesn’t want to be the stereotypical married couple who are “boring”, leading to her spending a lot of time with girlfriends and who happen to be single and planning vacations with them. After getting married, she’s trying to exert her independence and admittedly so. By doing so her prioritiues have shifted and I am no longer the #1 priority in her life. I don’t necessarily have an issue with spending time with girlfriends, but she has absolutely no concept of money and doesn’t care that to go out and do things costs money. Her philosophy is if she wants something, she’s going to do it and worry about money later. I am very in tune with finances and the idea of planning for the future but money is the least of my concerns at this point.

Age could be part of the problem as there is a 10 year gap and she definitely has some growing up to do. We love each other very much but I’m starting to feel like I made a huge mistake. I think she liked the idea of being married but has not the first clue on what a marriage is or what’s important in a marriage. I’ve asked her numerous times what she thinks a marriage is and either she can’t answer it or brings up only the emotional aspects. I’m hearing the words “I” and “Me” a lot instead of “Us” and “We” and I feel like I’m the only one in this partnership. I fell in love and proposed to one person and married someone completely different. I’m getting to the end of my rope and don’t know what to do.